Is-e-real Folate, patron saint of prejudice.

Dear reader it’s hard to keep abreast of what brand of religious intolerance we should be following, harder still to identify potential risks within society that may make us more “un- Australian”.

So in a paean to the past we pen this portrayal of good old fashioned prejudice so that we may reminisce more fully on a purer society. This piece is entitled empathetically, “Spastic Boots’. May Is-e-real folate lead us once agin to this promised land.

Spastic Boots

It was pretty plain he was gonna be called “spastic boots”, cos he wore calipers. Might have been the last of the polio generation. Or maybe he was just born “spazzo”. 

Some kids are like that, just a bit different. 

A bit like “One Ball” who failed the school medical. It might have been kept confidential but after lining up in your jocks on the stage of the school hall and having doctors in white lab coats asking you to cough and fiddle with your goolies, before passing you on. It was impossible for “ ONE BALL” to escape the mirth and sudden immortality. When your moniker is frozen at “One Ball”. Nothing can erase that fateful moment. It’s like the death of Lady Di or JFK.  Everyone who was there knew that moment. And it became crystallised as an eternal truth. Even now, good folk not intent on intimidation wave to him upon a chance encounter in the  street, “G Day One Ball”. And “One Ball”, with scarcely a hesitation strides purposefully onwards acknowledging the greeting with a cheery “Hullo”. There’s a nostalgia to such encounters. It’s ‘old school’. That’s why “Spastic Boots” was allowed to just hang around being pathetic and different.  He wasn’t a real spazzo, it’s just he was different, and he sort of accepted it. And we sort of accepted his lower status. 

We’d all have a good laugh when the Spastic bus would make its turn into Mitcham Road. You couldn’t miss it. It was Blue, the same blue that bureaucrats give to the interiors of  mental asylums and waste paper baskets in the tax office. And just in case you didn’t get it, it wasn’t big like the Bedford that took us to swimming or excursions. This was a little pint sized Bedford, sometimes a smaller Morris that was squared off at the back. And in the front, up top in a special moulded nacelle above the driver where you’d have the destination on a ribbon in bold white letters against a stark black background it just said ‘SPASTIC BUS’. And just in case you missed it, on the back in bigger letters sort of stencilled and half rounded it said with emphasis ‘SPASTIC BUS’.  And the driver who looked like he part timed-it as the delivery man for the Herald in the afternoon, wore a cap like chauffeurs or junior officers wear. And a grey dust jacket. Just like the one the paper delivery man wore as he tossed bundles of papers out at the newsagent.  And pretending not to notice us, he‘d just look fixedly ahead, and pass us by as though we  didn’t exist. Clearly it was important and serious business taking the ‘Spazzos’ to the ‘Spazzo Centre’. Where they’d spend all day stacking matches into matchboxes, putting clothes pegs in baskets or tearing up rags. Cos we knew that was just about all Spazzos were good for. They could never aspire to do real jobs, like deliver papers or be a policeman. That action alone branded him, and we rose to the challenge. The call would go out, “Here comes the Spazzos’ and as it paused at the lights, we’d race over to the chain mesh and round hollow section steel pipe fence, and perform our sacred ritual of the Spazzo bus’s passing. 

With howls and hoots and a unconscious sense of the Brueghellian we’d do ‘Spazzo walks’, conduct self administered ‘Spaz-attacks’ and ape-like, pretend to walk/crawl all awhile hoping that the Spazzo’s would be looking at us through their goz-smeared windows, goldfish-like with wide stupid blinking eyes at the antics being performed in their honour. To acknowledge our greetings, our enthusiasm, our inclusiveness, our welcoming into the bossom of our society as they passed. And when they did pass, and the blue bus faded into the distance we all opined the sadness that the performance must be shelved again for another day, and all that idiocy would soon be tamed by the dull metrics of education, the strap and the requirement to do what we were told. This before the era of multiculturalism gave us a taste of another world in which other people lived out a life of mystery. Incalculable mystery. Where some boys we has been told didn’t even have real dicks, and went to the toilet with a sort of kind of nozzle that was popularised by wine casks. Such thoughts made us gulp in suppressed wonder at our luckiness to be raised “ normal”.

Till then we only had a few amongst us to be amused by. Mathew with the hydrocephalic head we nicknamed ‘Bowling Ball’. Peter the kid who had the uncanny knack of pissing under the teachers desk, we nicknamed him “Puddles” The kid with incurable ringworm we called ‘Hole in the head’, and Sharon Keep who was smelly, but not a patch on Brett Ellingham who was dirt poor, smelt, became ‘Brett Smelingham” and wore plastic sandals cos his parents couldn’t afford shoes. But we tolerated them, never invited them to our parties, and knew they’d ever be good at cricket, footy or anything. But we felt a sort of proprietal custodianship, they were “OUR” spazzos, and they were special. Not special enough to go to the Special School but special enough. 

Nowadays, every kid has an allergy. Is on the spectrum. Are on drugs to abate their HDHD. They suffer psychosis, their neurosis, their eating disorders, their bulimia and their self harm. Their desire  to get out of this narrowing world of standardisation, consumerism and instagram. No wonder they want to be somewhere else. The standardisation of conditions and conditioning, and the dull uniformity of pity disguised as dignity re-badged as the NDIS. Marginalised and subjected to the dull abnegation of charity. Oh for the sanctity of the Spastic Bus.

Now we’re all bit spastic.

To be compartmentalised as Is-e real Folate would have it.